Christian Jambet

Christian Jambet (born 23 April 1949, Algiers, French Algeria) is a French philosopher and Islamologist.

He was a student of Henry Corbin.

His work has engaged with Nizari Isma'ilism and has explored the thought of Avicenna, Mulla Sadra, and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi among others.

In his treatment of these thinkers, he notes the lasting influence of figures associated with Neoplatonism such as Plotinus and Proclus(cf Theology of Aristotle).

The impact of Avicenna upon Jacques Lacan is mentioned in Chapter 3 The Avicennian Moment of The Act of Being: The Philosophy of Revelation in Mullā Sadrā, pg 143:

"...Avicenna's definitions of the possible, the impossible, and the necessary, which are for him the only three 'states' of the existent as existent. He says that it is difficult to define these three modailities and that the ancients, from whom we inherit these terms, did not escape the vicious circle. Indeed, when they wanted to define the possible, they included in its definition either the impossible or the necessary. And when they wanted to define the impossible, they included in its definition either the necessary or the possible.

The three modalities form, as it were, three circles that implicate one another and are all bound together (in a manner that is somewhat analogous to the weaving together of the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary in the Lacanian schema).

It is impossible to separate one of the modalities from the others without dissolving all three of them into inconsistency.

Just as Lacan grants a certain primacy to the real among the three circles, Avicenna considers the necessary dimension of being 'the one that must be represented as primary.' This comparison of the two schemata is not arbitrary.

In his way, Lacan is a distant heir to Avicenna.

But he is a very unfaithful heir, and willfully so: the real, which in a certain sense has primacy over the symbolic and the imaginary, is more analogous to the impossible than to the necessary.

In the Lacanian schema, the real is analogous to the impossible, the symbolic to the necessary, and the imaginary to the possible.

Giving priority to the circle of the real over the two other circles involves a decision concerning being that is opposed to Avicenna's decision(a decision that governs all of Western ontology up to Leibniz and Hegel).

It is an attempt to put an end to the Avicennian moment I am outlining here.

I say this in order to emphasize Avicenna's decision, to underline its tremendous importance.

For Avicenna, the necessary is first.

It is what we must begin with..."

Critique of Hegel

This is the supreme task of a counter-phenomenology.

The problem is to sustain within logic the rights of that which is ‘non-totalizable’ (LO: 108).

Jambet formulates this idea more Lacanianly: Hegelian dialectic secretes a flaw, the real.

It is precisely that flaw that one needs to think within historical reason.